This invention relates to a care cart for life support systems and a system for transporting a patient and for transferring a patient from his or her transport bed to another patient support surface such as an X-ray table.
When a patient is in intensive care or critical care, the patient is usually connected to a number of life support systems as, for example, infusion pumps for delivering IV solutions, oxygen, suction, heart monitoring, and the like. Such patients need to be transported, with their life support systems, from the patient's room to other stations in the hospital where diagnostic or treating equipment is provided such as X-ray, CAT scan and MRI. There, the patient must be transferred from the transporting bed to the table of the diagnostic/treating equipment. The life support systems must remain attached but be out of the way of the functioning of the personnel and equipment.
These needs have been known. One attempt to meet the need has been to provide a wheeled tree, so to speak, on which the life support equipment is mounted. The tree stays by the patient's bed in the patient's room, but when the patient is transported to another location, an attendant pushes the tree along with the bed which is pushed by another attendant.
Cleveland Clinic Foundation has developed another system as described in its U.S. Pat. No. 4,795,122. An overhead boom is provided in the patient's room and a detachable IV rack is mounted on the boom. The swinging capability of the boom enables the nursing staff to move the IV rack out of the way when necessary to attend to the patient. A transport bed that has a mating connection to the IV rack is adapted to receive the IV rack as it is lowered from the boom toward the patient's bed. The IV rack is then separated from the boom, enabling it to be carried with the patient to the site of the diagnostic/treating equipment. At that site, a similar boom is provided to grasp the IV rack and lift it off the bed so that it is out of the way of the transfer and treatment of the patient.